Night in the Woods co-creators' Revenant Hill cancelled amid "serious health issues"

Night in the Woods co-creators’ Revenant Hill cancelled amid “serious health issues”

Time Stamp: November 7, 2023 4:28 PM

Revenant Hill, the next game from Night in the Woods co-creators Bethany Hockenberry and Scott Benson and the first project from their new studio The Glory Society, has been cancelled amid “serious health issues” impacting several members of the team.

Revenant Hill was officially unveiled back in May, teasing an adventure, set in the year 1919, that would follow Twigs the cat’s attempts to make ends meet after an “owl from the next hill” began demanding she pay rent on her wet log near an abandoned graveyard.

There were hints of systems reminiscent of farming sims, with crops to be grown and a community to be built as the seasons passed, albeit with a cast of witches, demons, and ghosts, and more serious considerations on its mind. “Times are hard,” The Glory Society wrote at the time, “Something big and dark is at work in the towns, the factories, in the forests and hills. At some point, someone is going to have to push back. And they can’t do it alone.”

Revenant Hill announcement trailer.

It was a tantalising glimpse of things to come, but sadly, work on Revenant Hill has now officially reached an end. Announcing the news in a statement on social media, the studio explained, “Making anything complex poses challenges along the way. Games take a while to make and usually require a good team working together. We’ve been lucky to have one such good team.”

“Unfortunately,” it continued, “recent serious health issues have necessitated two key members stepping away from the project indefinitely. We are a small team and we each wear multiple hats. This is a loss of several hard to replace hats in an environment where all hats are needed. Given the realities of schedules, budgets, and the fraught task of reworking the whole project within those parameters, the team has amicably decided to suspend operations. For all intents and purposes, this is the end of the development of Revenant Hill.”

“We are a co-operative, and we make decisions as a group,” the statement continued. “For us, this was the clear path to take for the well-being of the team, which is frankly more important than games. In the future, after the dust has settled, perhaps we’ll talk about what we’ve made and learned together. In the meantime, we want to thank everyone who worked with us, supported us, and believed in us.”

“Sometimes things happen beyond your control that change the available options and you just have to roll with it together. Glory was a project in and of itself, and it’s one we’re proud to have been part of. Thank you for caring about what we did. Take care of each other, and support the workers doing the labour of making the games you love. We’ll see you around.”

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